RAID6 will rebuild with two failed drives, but you also lose more available storage capacity (50%) due to it doing double parity information.It's similar to RAID1+0 with 4 drives, but is better if you have more.
I think you should be good with a RAID5 setup as it will give you 9TB if you use 4x3TB drives.

There is so much data on the likelihood of RAID failures that it makes your head spin. Just go with what you are comfortable with
(and can afford) and you can always modify your setup in the near future if you feel the need.

With 9+TBs of data backing the data up to somewhere else will definitely add expense. I suggest going with the lowest common denominator and using floppies. (just kidding)

Just to put things in perspective one of my raid 0 based samsung F3 1TB's finally died. Other is kicking up smart errors left and right. Rather disappointed luckily its all backed up between my 2TB NAS and 1.5TB seagate.

Just to put things in perspective one of my raid 0 based samsung F3 1TB's finally died. Other is kicking up smart errors left and right. Rather disappointed luckily its all backed up between my 2TB NAS and 1.5TB seagate.

It does not matter how long. Why go through all this and even bother if you aren't even going to have a real backup?

Click to expand...

I'd be running RAID5 so I have some protection from a hard drive failure, as opposed to right now where i have absolutely no protection and my files are scattered across multiple computers in disarray.

Everything is a weight of cost/risk/reward. I'm not just doing this for backup, I'm doing it for quality of life. I don't want to deal with running 2 NAS's and dropping over $2K.

It does not matter how long. Why go through all this and even bother if you aren't even going to have a real backup?

Click to expand...

Having a backup of a lot of data is expensive, or cumbersome (multiple external drives for example). Figure for myself, a half way point is get a redundant storage setup with RAID5. Gives you room for error. A drive is more likely to fail than the NAS itself. I purchased a NAS myself for the space increase, keeping it all in one spot and having it network accessible. Can see it from my laptop, my desktop and an HTPC (when i get one in the future). Much more convenient and easy.

A mini-ITX system wouldn't be that much bigger than a NAS and you can get some really cheap Atom boards, although you'd most likely need a third party SATA controller, since most Atom boards only support two drives.

A mini-ITX system wouldn't be that much bigger than a NAS and you can get some really cheap Atom boards, although you'd most likely need a third party SATA controller, since most Atom boards only support two drives.

I recommend sticking with the Synology box. My boss (the CIO where I work,) has a Synology box and he loves it. Keep in mind how you're going to back it up though. If you have 9Tb to work with, just keep in mind that you need to back that up somewhere which is the concern I'm running into if I expand my raid beyond 2TB. (3x1TB drives.)

I backup what kreij says, my nas at home is 2x 1tb drives in raid 1 I have that scheduled to do a backup to an external 2tb drive. The 80$ I spent on the external is easily justified if the nas ever kicks the bucket (remember a raid controller failure has a chance to take the drives with it) also I have it scan the nas first to ensure its virus/malware free before its backed up to the external.

There are a couple of things you can't help though.

1. data corruption, without a utility to scan for this or without you manually checking everything for it your scheduler will backup a corrupted copy. (this includes something that was corrupted from malware/viruses that have since been cleaned) A workaround for this is to have a backup solution that's larger than your NAS. This allows you to save multiple copies and run a file comparison program to ensure that corrupted data doesn't overwrite your master copy without interrupting an automatic schedule or making the backup take so long it times out or fails to finish before new data is overwritten by normal activity.

2. total destruction as in fire, earthquake, flooding, lightning, etc. If your solution is entirely held at one location, you're screwed in the event of a disaster. Many will cite an online backup solution as a way to avoid this, but upload speeds are prohibitive if you have a lot of data to backup, also online backup solutions don't allow you to use your own utilities to scan for data corruption of the backed up copy. Instead this makes it necessary to pick and choose what is most important and either keep that backed up to a thumb drive that's always with you or a separate backup that you do manually and then dump into a fire proof/flood proof safe (you should have one for your most important paper documents anyways). An online solution can be used for this important data, but you will need something to manually scan and compare the data for corruption before it overwrites it.

just food for thought. In the end I have no idea how important the data you're looking to back up is. Most of the time when you're running out of space its movies, music, or games and not the most important thing in the world. A 128GB thumb drive could be used for a "important data" backup and then you could leave the NAS as is without the need to back up the whole thing, just the things that matter to you (pictures, self taken videos, important professional and personal documents, etc. Most will fit easily on 128GB.)

Having a backup of a lot of data is expensive, or cumbersome (multiple external drives for example). Figure for myself, a half way point is get a redundant storage setup with RAID5. Gives you room for error. A drive is more likely to fail than the NAS itself. I purchased a NAS myself for the space increase, keeping it all in one spot and having it network accessible. Can see it from my laptop, my desktop and an HTPC (when i get one in the future). Much more convenient and easy.

Click to expand...

You don't need some enterprise-level tape drive set up. A 2 or 3TB drive that you drag all your media to once a week (and that ideally is stored somewhere else most of the time) would suffice much better than nothing. I just think it's silly to bother with this project if it could all be rendered a waste of time (and possibly also money) when a drive dies. And, with RAID 5, Murphys Law states that another drive will die during the heavy workload rebuild and then you are hosed.

Rendundant RAID is better than having JBOD or especially a stripe with no actual backup but still...

as far as backing up the NAS, identify what data you absolutely cannot lose, hook a USB flash drive to the NAS, use the provided NAS software to backup those files nightly.

this has worked great for me. the only files i cannot lose are photos and digital personal documents. A 32 GB USB 3 flash drive is large enough and fast enough to do the job. also, i have them backed up to the cloud offsite.

Higher capacity drives have higher failure rates. Also, how do you plan on backing up all of this data? RAID doesn't replace a backup, it just minimizes down time while maximizing performance (sans RAID-0).

Higher capacity drives have higher failure rates. Also, how do you plan on backing up all of this data? RAID doesn't replace a backup, it just minimizes down time while maximizing performance (sans RAID-0).

Click to expand...

It's going to be a NAS essentially filled with media. I figured having a raid 5 gives me some redundancy and protection in addition to using more reliable drives in the first place.

There's no way i'm going to nearly double my budget to backup 4 or 5 TB of data. If there's mission critical information I can always pass it on to one of (or all) of my computers or stick a USB drive in and save any important documents I may have.

Unless someone wants to donate another $400 or whatever to me I figure having important information on a couple computers, copies on a NAS, and possibly more copies on USB drives to be enough backup.

It comes from experience.
People are just trying to help you avert the potential nightmare of data loss. No more, no less.

Click to expand...

Well then I'm always open to options and such, but I just seem to be getting people telling me i'm not backing up enough without giving me any more information in terms of what I can do within my thousand dollar budget. I know I'm probably going to need around 5TB of space, I'm size AND appearance restricted and want something relatively low power. I haven't officially hit the 'buy' button yet (just have everything in cart).

You're doing fine. Concentrate on getting the NAS you want and get it set up properly.
Then we can talk about backup options.

Click to expand...

Sorry I was just getting a little annoyed there. The whole purpose of this wasn't even for backup, it was just for quality of life. Maybe down the road I'll get into backing up more stuff, but I just don't care to spend a crapton more money to just backup media.

Also a new challenger,

Thecus N4200PRO

Anyone know anything about that drive? It's about in my price range (there's a 5 bay version slightly more expensive that i think was already posted on page one).

Would there be any benefit to me going RAID5 with 5 drives instead of 4? Or does anything significant change at all?

Losing data sucks, believe me. Not just because there is stuff you will never get back but the stuff you can get back will take days. It's a huge waste of time if you don't back-up your data, at least the important stuff, so you don't go taking a walk down that road. The biggest bit of data I lost it took me over a year to get back to where I was and I'm still missing documents from it which I doubt that I will ever get back.

If your budget has room for it, get an extra drive for your RAID so in case a drive does fail, you can swap it out quickly. The less time RAID-5 spends in degraded mode, the less chance you'll lose more than 1 drive at once.

Losing data sucks, believe me. Not just because there is stuff you will never get back but the stuff you can get back will take days. It's a huge waste of time if you don't back-up your data, at least the important stuff, so you don't go taking a walk down that road. The biggest bit of data I lost it took me over a year to get back to where I was and I'm still missing documents from it which I doubt that I will ever get back.

If your budget has room for it, get an extra drive for your RAID so in case a drive does fail, you can swap it out quickly. The less time RAID-5 spends in degraded mode, the less chance you'll lose more than 1 drive at once.

Now, would your quality of life be better or worse if you lost terabytes worth of media? I know mine wouldn't get better, that is for sure.

Click to expand...

Well alternatively right now I still have a pile of data, and a much higher risk of losing it because I have no NAS OR backup. So i'm going to lose a pile of information if any one of my drives fails anywhere.

Any important data is already spread across multiple computers. So in the case my laptop dies, my main desktop dies, my backup PC dies, and 2 drives in the NAS i don't have yet dies all at the same time i should be ok for important data.

Next level of data is my music, which is copied on my laptop, desktop and would be on the NAS.

Next level would be the movies, which to lose those would apparently take 2 drives dying at once.

Now I know it's not perfect, but I'm comfortable with those risks. Getting another NAS to backup my NAS just doesn't seem worth it in my particular case.

alrighty 1. larger drives may have a higher failure rate than smaller ones, but its not enough of a difference that a 3tb drive will have a higher failure rate than 3 x 1tb drives. More drives, more chance of failure, period. Being this is low budget 3 3tb drives in RAID 5 seems more manageable than 8 1tb in RAID 50 (if his controller even supports 50). Also by sheer odds the raid 5 solution of 3 drives is less likely to incur a failure than an 8 drive solution, 6 drive solution, or even 4 drive solution. (you could always go down to 3x 2tb but you indicated the potential of 5tb of data)

2. on the Thecus N4200PRO. It's not exactly going to bring the benchmark boom, but its pretty featureful. If you can get it cheap it would work for your needs, but personally the price is about 100$ too much for what it offers. Also I'm curious as to why raid 6 is even an option on it. In a 4 drive solution it has the same capacity as raid 10, while chewing more cpu cycles and being slower overall.

have you thought about the drives you want to use? I might have missed it.